The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Nick took the gun, looked at it in surprise. “I’m not very good with a rifle,” he said. “But I’ll make sure it goes to someone who can use it.”

  “Take these shells, you.” Cudjo dug in the pockets of his old coat, dropped cartridges into Nick’s hand. Little ones, he realized, .22s.

  “I don’t want to leave you without a rifle,” Nick said. “I’m sure you can use this better than anyone.”

  “That my squirrel gun, there,” Cudjo said. “Only a two-two. When I come back tomorrow, me, I bring my deer gun, yes? Thirty-ought-six.”

  Nick was almost blinded by sudden possibility. Even Cudjo’s little .22 would make a difference to the camp. Fired from cover it could make the deputies keep their heads down, if nothing else. And when Cudjo returned with his deer rifle, his .30-’06, he could do a lot of damage from the cover of the woods, and with reasonable safety to himself.

  Eagerness seized Nick. “Let me tell you what I’m planning,” he said. He unrolled his entire plan for Cudjo, while the woodsman listened, nodded, and asked questions. Then Cudjo analyzed Nick’s plan, took it apart, and reassembled it in an altered, more perfected form.

  “Yes,” Nick said. “Yes, I see.”

  “Kill them Kluxers, take them Kluxers out, before you push the people on, yes? You no run them into guns, you.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Direction you want run, that depend. No use planning too much, plans go to hell when shooting starts.” No plan survives contact with the enemy, Nick thought. His father had said that. “I understand,” he said.

  “Can you take the women and kids to where it will be safe?” Nick asked.

  “I try, me.”

  “But what about getting someone out?” someone else asked. “What about Mrs. Morris?”

  “You give me someone, you, I take him,” said Cudjo.

  “It’s important that Cudjo be there with his rifle,” Nick said.

  “If we can get word out, there won’t be a need for guns.”

  Nick considered an argument in favor of keeping Cudjo near the camp instead of running errands. Cudjo was an asset; he was the most hopeful thing that had occurred in the camp’s entire miserable history. Sneaking someone away with him, someone who might not be so good at creeping the goose as Cudjo, seemed an unnecessary risk to Nick’s asset. And sending Cudjo off on an errand to Mrs. Morris’s house, when he might be needed in the camp, seemed dangerous.

  But on the other hand, the idea of contacting the outside was seductive. It meant no one inside the camp had to take any risks, or fight other battles. All they had to wait was for Mrs. Morris to call in the U.S. Cavalry. Nick could see how the others were attracted by the idea, how much they wanted to escape this situation without having to fight a war.

  “Listen,” Nick said. “We don’t want to risk Cudjo. We don’t want to risk him in the company of someone who’s less expert at—” his tongue stumbled “—at creeping the goose.” Whispers flurried at him in urgent debate. The only person who held Nick’s point of view was Tareek Hall, the conspiracy theorist, who said that there wasn’t any point in sending for help, that the authorities were all part of the conspiracy anyway. But Tareek and Nick were clearly outnumbered.

  “Send Cudjo out first,” Nick finally said. “Your messenger can go next. That way if he’s—” He was about to say killed, then changed it. “If he’s caught,” he said, “then Cudjo won’t be caught with him.” There was more whispered debate, but Cudjo ended the debate himself. “I reckon Nick right, me. I be better alone, for true.”

  The committee members chose one of their number as their messenger, a thirtyish woman named Nora. She was small and nimble, had taught gymnastics, and it was hoped that speed and agility would aid her escape. The fact that she was a woman might make her less threatening to the locals she would approach for help. She listened eagerly when Cudjo gave her instructions—vague hints, really—for avoiding the guards’ attention. Nick approached the chain link with Cudjo, then hesitated. “I shouldn’t come to the fence,” he said. “I might be seen.”

  “Can’t see nothing, them guards,” Cudjo said. “That light along the fence, it make dark behind. Can you see the woods from here, Nick? They should point their lights into the camp, those Kluxers, they want to see in here.”

  Nick gazed past the fence in surprise. Cudjo was right. The spotlights, trained parallel to the fence, created a comparative darkness on either side. The pathway along the fence was brightly lit, but the camp itself was shrouded, and so were the woods on the other side of the lane.

  “You kiss you lady for me, yes?” Cudjo said. His yellow teeth flashed for a moment, and then he stepped from Nick’s presence and was gone.

  Nick stood in silent surprise, his heart hammering. For a long moment his eyes searched the darkness, and then he saw Cudjo crouched just inside the fence, his big hat slowly scanning left and right as he observed the guards. Then there was swift movement as he lay flat and rolled under the fence into the tall, untrimmed grass that grew beneath the wire.

  For an instant, Cudjo was standing in the light outside the wire, frozen as if motionless. Then the man was gone.

  Nick realized he was holding his breath, and he let the breath go hissing into the night. Creeping the goose. It had seemed uncanny, magical.

  “My turn,” Nora muttered. Her eyes were wide, and there was a tremor in her voice.

  “You don’t have to go,” Nick said. Nora was brave, he thought, she was lithe and fast. But she wasn’t magical. She wasn’t Cudjo.

  Nora gave him a look. “Yes, I do.”

  Nick saw her do as Cudjo had done, crouch low by the wire while she looked left and right at the deputies. Then she was down, rolling under the wire. And up, arms and legs pumping as she ran for the woods.

  There was a sudden boom, the blast of a shotgun stunning the night, and Nora fell onto the earth, a sudden, limp tangle of awkward limbs. Nick’s stunned retinas retained an afterimage of bright blood staining the air.

  He heard groans, cries from the people around him.

  There was another shot, just to make certain Nora was dead.

  Then more shots, this time into the wire. Shot whined off the chain link, strange Doppler noises. Nick was on the ground then, crawling into cover, so he never saw the deputy walk up to Nora, pull his pistol, and shoot her in the head.

  Nick lay in the night, pulse throbbing in his skull. His nerves leaped with every sound. Finally he rose and made his silent way to the cookhouse, to finish building his bombs.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  As we were all wrapt in sleep, each tells his story in his own way. I will also relate my simple tale. At the period above mentioned, I was roused from sleep by the clamor of windows, doors and furniture in tremulous motion, with a distant rumbling noise, resembling a number of carriages passing over pavement—in a few seconds the motion and subterraneous thunder increased more and more: believing the noise to proceed from the N. or N.W. and expecting the earth to be relieved by a volcanic eruption, I went out of doors & looked for the dreadful phenomenon. The agitation had now reached its utmost violence. I entered the house to snatch my family from its expected ruins, but before I could put my design in execution the shock had ceased, having lasted about one and three fourth minutes. The sky was obscured by a thick hazy fog, without a breath of air. Fahrenheit thermometer might have stood at this time at about 35 or 40 (degrees).

  Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis) Saturday, December 21, 1811

  Flash. Flash. Flash. The laser pulsed on Jessica’s retina.

  “There.” The doctor’s voice. “Can you see anything now?”

  Jessica covered her right eye. The doctor’s face floated toward her out of the darkness. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t know whether to be hopeful or not. “But it’s like tunnel vision.”

  “I’ve just started.” Jessica lay back in the padded head-rest and felt the doctor lean over her. “I saw you on television the other day,” the doctor s
aid. “With the President.”

  “Yes.” Flash.

  “What’s he really like?” Flash flash.

  “I don’t know him well. I’ve only met him a couple times.” She smiled. “But he did appoint me to my job, so I think it’s obvious that he’s a great statesman.”

  Flash. Flash flash flash.

  “I voted for him,” the doctor said. “But it was just a stab in the dark, you know. You can’t really tell with those people.”

  The first time Jessica had met the President, all she had felt was the man’s charisma. When he looked at you, your insides went all warm and tingly. You wanted to roll on your back and have him rub your tummy. Even for someone as professionally accustomed to alpha males as Jessica, the effect had been surprising.

  All big politicians were like that, though. Jessica had met a few. They all carried that enormous top-dog energy. The lucky ones could project it on television.

  This last time, though, the meeting on Poinsett Island, the President’s affect had been different. It wasn’t so much as that the glow wasn’t there, but that it had gone somewhere that Jessica couldn’t reach. Though there was nothing Jessica could put her finger on, she had the sense that, at least part of the time, the commander-in-chief wasn’t home.

  Hey, she told herself. Give the guy a break. He’s just lost his wife. Flash. Flash flash.

  She had lost the last of the vision in her left eye on the return helicopter trip to Vicksburg. The doctor, though, had been encouraging when he spoke to Pat on the telephone. Jessica had probably detached a retina. It sounded frightening—and Jessica was very frightened—but the doctor assured Pat that the retina could most likely be tacked back on with a laser.

  To Jessica’s surprise, she didn’t have to check into a hospital. Unless there was some complication, the procedure could be done in the doctor’s office.

  And that meant she wouldn’t have to be absent from her command for more than few hours. By the time the paperwork for the procedure caught up with the Army—and that would take a long while, given the current emergency—she would have been back at her work for weeks, if not months. Which meant that it would be far too late to question her presence at her job.

  Flash flash flash. “The vitreal humor,” the doctor said conversationally, “that’s the jelly in the center of your eye. Well, it was probably pulling away from the retina—it happens to most of us as we get older. But in your case the vitreal humor pulled the retina away with it. Probably the earthquake tore everything loose.”

  “Not the earthquake. It was a bumpy helicopter ride.”

  The doctor was amused. “We don’t get many of those,” he said.

  Flash flash flash.

  “How’s that?”

  Jessica blinked cautiously at the world. Reality seemed more or less intact.

  “I can see,” she said in surprise.

  “You may have lost some detail,” the doctor said. “Time will tell.”

  “I—thank you, doctor. Thank you.”

  “Lie back and let me take another tour of your eye,” the doctor said. “I want to check and make certain I haven’t missed something.”

  “Certainly.” Jessica leaned back on the padded headrest.

  “And another thing,” the doctor said. “No more helicopter rides.” Jessica felt herself smile. She had got here on a helicopter, a smoother ride than driving the torn road between Vicksburg and Jackson.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Armando Gurule, the electrician’s apprentice. “I’ve made this double safe. To set off the claymores, you’ve got to throw both these switches, right?”

  “Right,” Nick said. He bit his lip, looked at the wires. “What if they cut power to the camp?” Armando gave a laugh. “They can’t. Look at the power line. They run their own floodlights off the same power source.”

  Nick nodded. “Good.”

  “So you throw the switches. And then all the claymores go at once. Boom.”

  “Boom,” Nick agreed.

  Nick blinked gum from his eyes. The sun was just beginning to rise behind the trees east of the camp. In the last hour of darkness he had buried his mines—he’d ended up with eleven—leaving nothing but the detonator wires sticking out of the ground. Armando had crawled after Nick and connected the wires to his homemade control board, then covered the gear with grass or bits of matting or plastic sheeting.

  “I hope this works,” Armando said. “I’m from the Dominican Republic, man. I don’t understand this crazy scene at all. I keep thinking I’m here by accident.”

  “We’re all here by accident,” Nick said.

  “I guess so.”

  Weariness dragged at Nick’s thoughts. He hadn’t slept at all during the night, and only fitfully on the boat the night before. The thought that he might have forgotten something important beat at his brain like a weak, insistent pulse.

  “I’m going to talk to the committee,” he said. “Then I’m going to try to get some rest. Make sure you wake me if the bad guys come.”

  “You bet.”

  Nick dragged himself to the pecan tree, told the combined Escape and Camp Committees that he’d finished his job. “I’m getting a little worried about security,” he said. “What I’ve been doing isn’t exactly secret. Probably most of the camp knows about it by now.” He rubbed his weary eyes. “What if someone decides he can sell the information to the coneheads?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” someone on the Camp Committee said. “They aren’t going to let anyone out of here.”

  “People don’t always think straight,” Nick said. “All you need is one parent panicked for the safety of a baby, or an alcoholic who will do anything for a drink…”

  “Or a white man who got put in here by mistake,” said Tareek Hall. “Or who was planted in here as a spy by the conspiracy. Or some nigger traitor seduced by the conspiracy, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.”

  The others were too tired to argue, but they took Nick’s point. “The deputies already said nobody but the Camp Committee can come near the fence,” someone said. “All we have to do is enforce that from our side.”

  Tareek began to say something about microphones planted by the conspiracy, and laser beams in orbital satellites that could make people behave crazy, but there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do about that. “You people have to organize the fighters,” Nick said. “I can’t do that—I don’t know the people. You have to find someone to enforce the rules. And you’ve got to do it yesterday.”

  “We got motivation,” one man said. He pointed to the fence, where Nora’s body still lay. “We know what happens if anything goes wrong.”

  Nick could barely breathe in the hot and humid air. His mind swam. “I’m going to try to rest,” he said, and left them to their arguments.

  He’d done what he could. Maybe later he’d think of something else to do, but right now he was too weary to think of anything but sleep.

  He went into the storage shed where he’d found the fertilizer and motor oil and lay on the soft, oil-soaked planks. Sleep took him in an instant.

  Nick was vaguely aware of Arlette waking him with some breakfast on a plastic plate, but he was less interested in food than in sleep. When he next woke the sun was high, and his body was soaked with sweat where it lay against the floor-boards.

  They didn’t come, he thought vaguely. The deputies had not come. No one had discussed this possibility. He sat up, and pain hammered through his stiffened body. He saw the plastic plate where Arlette had left it. It held two of the strange greasy crackers and a small mound of an opalescent gelatinous matter. He pushed the stuff around with one of the crackers and concluded that the mysterious substance was made from powdered eggs, but lacked the usual yellow food coloring that turned them into a reasonable facsimile of fresh, scrambled eggs.

  Nick scooped some onto a cracker and took a bite. The taste wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good, either. He ate it
all.

  He wandered out of the cookhouse and saw people lining up for lunch. He blinked in the sun. The deputies hadn’t come. He had been so certain that the deputies would arrive that morning, would enter the camp and drive the refugees like cattle to the slaughterhouse.

  It looked as if they would be given a breathing space. He should check all the work he’d done that night, make sure there wasn’t something he’d overlooked in the darkness.

  The plan could be refined. Everybody could be made to better understand their roles, to understand the necessity of what Nick needed them to do.

  He set about the task.

  Jason gazed at the woman’s body lying beyond the fence. One-eighty-six, he thought. Murder. Stars eddied in his head. He could feel his breakfast surge in his stomach, and he swallowed hard. He crouched on his heels on the grassy earth and looked at the body. He had seen so many bodies, he thought, bodies drifting down the river, blasted by bullets in Frankland’s camp, bodies whimpering life away like Miss Deena, now this woman one-eighty-six’d by the guardians of this prison. The world was probably paved with bodies.

  And not just the world, he corrected, but the universe. Sometimes stars blew up. His throat ached, the pain greater than yesterday. Awareness of the precarious fragility of existence filled his mind. The woman had thrown her own existence away, deliberately tempted death by walking into the lane of death outside the camp. People said her name was Nora. Nobody seemed to know her last name.

  Half her name, forgotten already.

  Jason had not seen the killing. When Nick, Cudjo, and the others began to argue their various plans back and forth, Manon had firmly drawn Arlette and Jason away from the circle and brought them to a place where they could sleep under one of the cotton wagons. Manon also made a point of sleeping between Arlette and Jason, keeping them apart during the night. Her determination made Jason smile quietly in the darkness as he drifted to sleep.

  The shots had torn Jason from sleep. Manon, beside him, woke with a cry, and Jason, in sudden fear, had put his hand over Manon’s mouth and whispered “Be quiet!” in an urgent voice. He could see the starlight glimmering on her eyes as she submitted.